Pinch Technology - Introduction

Whenever the design of a system is considered, limits exist that constrain the design.
Example 1: Distillation of two components that requires 400 equilibrium stages and a
tower with a diameter of 20 m would not be attempted, because the construction of such a
tower would be impossible with current techniques. A combination of towers in series and
parallel might be considered but would be very expensive. These mechanical limitations
are often a result of a constraint in the process design. The example of the distillation
column given is a result of the difficulty in separating two components with similar
volatility.
Example 2: When designing heat exchangers and other unit operations, limitations
imposed by the first and second laws of thermodynamics constrain what can be done with
such equipment. For example, in a heat exchanger, a close approach between hot and cold
streams requires a large heat transfer area. Likewise, in a distillation column, as the reflux
ratio approaches the minimum value for a given separation, the number of equilibrium
stages becomes very large. Whenever the driving forces for heat or mass exchange are
small, the equipment needed for transfer becomes large and it is said that the design has a
pinch. When considering systems of many heat- or mass-exchange devices (called
exchanger networks), there will exist somewhere in the system a point where the driving
force for energy or mass exchange is a minimum. This represents a pinch or pinch point.
The successful design of these networks involves defining where the pinch exists and using
the information at the pinch point to design the whole network. This design process is
designed as pinch technology. The concepts of pinch technology can be applied to a wide
variety of problems in heat and mass transfer.
The approach followed consists of establishing an algorithm for designing a heat- (mass-)
exchanger network that consumes the minimum amount of utilities and requires the
minimum number of exchangers (MUMNE).
The general algorithm is presented to give the minimum number of exchangers requiring
the minimum utility requirements for a given minimum approach temperature. The
algorithm to solve the minimum utility (MUMNE) problem consists of the following steps.

1. Choose a minimum approach temperature.

2. Construct a temperature interval diagram.
3. Construct a cascade diagram, and determine the minimum utility requirements and
the pinch temperatures.
4. Calculate the minimum number of heat exchangers above and below the pinch.
5. Construct the heat-exchanger network.
It is important to remember that the object of this exercise is to obtain a heat-exchanger
network that exchanges the minimum amount of energy between the process streams and
the utilities and uses the minimum number of heat exchangers to accomplish this. This
network is almost never the optimum economic design. However, it does represent a
good starting point for further study and optimization.
Each of the five steps given above is considered in detail as illustrated in Example 15.2.
Example 1
In a process, there are a total of six process streams that require heating or cooling. These
are listed below along with their thermal and flow data. A stream is referred to as “hot” if
it requires cooling, and “cold” if it requires heating. The temperature of the stream is not
used to define whether it is “hot” or “cold.”

For this system, design the MUMNE network.

Step 1: Choose a Minimum Approach Temperature. This represents the smallest
temperature difference that two streams leaving or entering a heat exchanger can have.
Typical values are from 5°C to 20°C. The value 10°C is chosen for this problem.

Step 2: Construct a Temperature Interval Diagram. In a temperature interval diagram,

all process streams are represented by a vertical line, using the convention that hot streams
that require cooling are drawn on the left-hand side and cool streams requiring heating are
drawn on the right. The left- and righthand axes are shifted by the minimum temperature
difference chosen for the problem, with the right-hand side being shifted down compared
with the left. In this figure, each process stream is represented by a vertical line with an
arrow at the end indicating the direction of temperature change. Horizontal lines are then
drawn through the ends of the lines and divide the diagram into temperature intervals. For
our problem, there are four temperature intervals. The net amount of available energy from
all the streams in a given temperature interval is given in the right-hand column. The
convention of (+) for excess energy and (–) for energy deficit is used. Thus, if the right-
hand column contains a positive number for a given temperature interval, this implies that
there is more than enough energy in the hot streams to heat the cold streams in that
temperature interval. In addition, because the cold streams have been shifted down by the
minimum approach temperature, energy can flow from left to right within a given
temperature interval without violating the second law of thermodynamics. The summation
of the numbers in the right-hand column is the net deficit or surplus enthalpy for all the
streams, which for this example is –50 kW.